


Bach was a Bastard

by thalialunacy



Category: Star Trek RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Classical Music, Ficlet, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-15
Updated: 2012-12-15
Packaged: 2017-11-21 09:10:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/595986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thalialunacy/pseuds/thalialunacy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The AU ficlet with the cello.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bach was a Bastard

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sangueuk](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sangueuk/gifts).



> for sangueuk, because of the thing in [this picture](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/thalialunacy/1077284/1319999/1319999_original.jpg) looking slightly like a cello case.

Chris scraped the bow across the strings violently, then blew out a breath that sounded suspiciously like an f-bomb. He shook out the fingers of his left hand, feeling the crease between his eyes blooming into a headache.

Fucking _Bach_.

Made him want to punch someone.

“I don’t get your distaste,” his mother would say. “The man was a genius.”

“Yeah, and a sadist,” Chris would answer, every time. “That shit’s like calculus. Calculus that _hurts_.”

She never could argue with that, but she disagreed, all the same. Same as it ever was.

The door opened quietly, but Chris’s nerves were so taut it was like a gunshot. The bow skidded along the strings, a car wreck of sound where before it had been merely driving too fast on a rainy day.

(Fucking _Bach_.)

He looked up, ready to either punch or desperately embrace the intruder, and when he saw the face of Karl looking around the doorframe, tall and dark and rosy-cheeked from the cold, he felt relief surge through him. Same as it ever was.

“Oh, thank fuck,” he exhaled as Karl came in and shut the door behind him. The little room seemed ten times fuller and twenty times less stressful.

“I thought that was you massacring the second suite,” Karl said dryly as he unbuttoned his jacket.

“Hey, fuck off.” Chris watched as the jacket got slung over an empty practice chair. “Technical directors do not get to critique second chair cellists.”

Karl took a seat like he always did, straddling the practice room piano’s bench like he was in a saloon.

“I’m not a technical director in here, though,” he said, sliding up until his knees touched Chris’s where they were wrapped around his cello, forming a perfect diamond of jeans. “I’m just here for you.”

Chris found himself leaning, slumping in until their foreheads touched beside the neck of the cello. “I know.”

Karl breathed with him once, twice, then pulled back, just enough to pick up Chris’s left hand in both of his. “Hmm,” he said, examining the red pads, “been here a while?”

“Fucking Bach,” was all Chris could reply.

“Ah.” Karl lifted the hand to his mouth, pressing his lips to the first one conciliatorily. Chris fought back a noise. “I think Bach would approve.”

Chris snorted, halfway at least before his second finger was kissed. “Of course he would. I’m killing myself over this thing.”

“No,” Karl said with quiet assurance, “you’re not, and that’s why he would. You give the music all you have, but afterwards are still you, are still a—” Chris watched his lips dip onto his ring finger. “—a complete person. Or maybe,” he finished contemplatively, eyeing Chris’s pinky before bestowing it with this particular brand of blessing, “that’s why I approve.”

Chris felt a corner of his mouth quirk up, then fall a little open as Karl trailed his lips lightly, slowly, reassuringly over the inside of Chris’s knuckles, then the pads of his palm, finishing with a kiss in the center. Like a seal.

Then he stood, grabbing his jacket and leaning down to plant a kiss on Chris’s upturned face. “Don’t worry about impressing Bach,” he said, holding Chris’s gaze. “He’s dead. You are the music now.”

Then he left. His words echoed in the room for a long, long minute.

Chris took a deep breath, cracked his knuckles, and picked up his bow.

 _Jane Smart was practicing Bach's Second Suite for unaccompanied cello, in D Minor, the little black sixteenth-notes of the prelude going up and down and then up again with the sharps and flats like a man slightly raising his voice in conversation, old Bach setting his infallible tonal suspense engine in operation again, and abruptly Jane began to resent it, these notes, so black and certain and masculine, the fingering getting trickier with each sliding transposition of the theme and he not caring, this dead square-faced old Lutheran with his wig and his Lord and his genius and two wives and seventeen children, not caring how the tips of her fingers hurt or how her obedient spirit was pushed back and forth, up and down by these military notes just to give him a voice after death, a bully's immortality…"_ \-- from ‘The Witches of Eastwick’ by John Updike


End file.
